Surfing the void
The video call ends and as the window closes there it is again. The heavy overwhelming feeling that works its way down over your shoulders through your chest and hits hardest in to the pit of your stomach. The sensation catches you off guard. It’s so powerful it sends you from a happy day in to a gutter leaving you feeling utterly hopeless. It’s the loss of missing out on the small moments in life you took for granted. It’s the feeling of being totally powerless to see and spend time with the people you love. It’s the brevity of the emptiness of the quiet days. It’s not seeing old friends for nearly 2 years. It’s watching life play out through a screen paired with the innate desire for the real thing. It’s walking down a street and hearing the accent from your own country with the way it reverberates to your core and reminds you of how far you are from home. It’s scrolling through social media and seeing pictures of mountains and other reminders that enact a physical tug on the heart strings. It’s the nights you go to bed on your own and the over bearing weight of our current reality hits. It’s your mind wandering in the wee hours of the night keeping you awake asking “When will it get better?”. It’s playing out the fictitious scenarios of being reunited with your friends 1000 times in your head. It’s sitting back and trying to smother the pain with whatever kind of distractions you can find to get yourself lost in. It’s feeling it all and having a wee greet.
Anyone who knows me knows me will tell you I’m usually a person full of energy and lust for life. For me that’s really generated by the people I have around me. I think I’ve always been a really emotional guy. However it’s not really until the past few months I have truly opened up and spoke about a lot that has been going on in my head for the longest time. I’m very Glaswegian to the extent that I love to talk (probably too much). There’s also this other side however to been a Scottish man that I can’t shy away from. It’s the fact that me like so many other young men like me feel for some reason we do not have a space to talk candidly about our feelings. I had personally became an expert in hiding how I have been truly feeling for so long. I shouldn’t have let myself suffer in a silent emergency for so long but for some reason I felt I had to. I now know how important it is to share my struggles and to know that they are valid. Life isn’t all sunshine and smiles and I would be daft to think so. In these past few months I think I’ve cried more than I have in the past few years. It’s really not been easy. It has been a gradual process for me and something that is so profoundly new and scary for me opening up in this way. I have been trying to manage a great flood of unsaid things that have existed in my mind for so long in the best way I can. I feel now like I have been pulled out from a tidal wave of emotions that I was drowning in. So how did it get better? It was all down to saying how I really felt. It was my friends offering me a safe space to come to terms and speak about so many things I felt for whatever reason I had to mute for so long. It’s something I shouldn’t have let myself get so lost in and I continue to beat myself up for not noticing sooner. Unfortunately hindsight is a wonderful thing. It’s always easier to connect the dots looking back. I have grown through what I have been through.
There is a question that we tend to glaze over so quickly: “How are you?”. It’s the mental obligation you feel to say “Yeah good!” knowing deep down you’re not really but don’t want to be a burden on someone else when you have no idea what they are going through. By repeating the question I have found in asking people how they really are they will give you a more fair reflection. I’ve been through an incredible amount of realisations in such an empty time. I guess that’s the thing right? with so much time filled with nothing it can be so hard to get out of these mental loops and not analyse every segment of the thoughts going through our minds. I think the reason why I wrote this tonight is because I want people to be the heroes to their friends like mine have been to me. Living in a foreign country and not being able to go home has posed its own challenges. Sometimes it really feels like carrying the weight of the world. Despite these times I’ve managed to foster some beautiful connections with some truly great people who have provided me a platform to say how I really feel. They have empowered me to reach higher, want for more and make me want to be the best version of myself. They make my home away from home feel like home. I think deep down we know we all have to go through this time together. It’s really tough out there right now. When they ask me how I really am I now just open up a wee bit more with each passing day. The mutual vulnerability we experience with each other is building a closeness that I have seen add a new facet to my experience of true friendship.
Tell the people you care about just how much you are grateful for their existence. Through the midst of these chaotic times in the past year I have been lucky enough to share some beautiful memories I can draw from to brighten my darkest days. I used the phrase “Surfing the void” last week with a colleague. I couldn’t have put it any better for spending time right now. For me it has been learning a new language and sometimes not speaking my native tongue for the day. It has been throwing myself in to progressing my career which was one of the reasons why I moved. It’s cycling endlessly, learning to cook good food and discovering new places. It’s also constantly realising that just when I think I have it all figured out life teaches me a new lesson. It’s realising that I feel more excited than fearful when wondering what’s coming next. It’s having good habits (and some bad) to kill the time until I can get back to some of the things I loved in life and currently mourn for. It’s knowing it won’t always be like this.
It’s been over a year of a harsh reality that has shook the foundations of everything I know and maybe even took for granted. I have my good days. I have my bad days. I think we all do but the difference is for me the sun is shining again. I don’t have to hide in the shade anymore. I know now more than ever that It’s ok to not be ok.
